The key phrase is "...due to Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1937". Japan deserved the embargo. It should have suckit it up and stay nicely on its island. They chose to be expansionistic, they chose to attack, they chose to be brutal, so in fact they chose to either conquer America or have many of its citizens killed. The later happened. It is like they sentences themselves to death and Americans just picked the execution method.
I was presenting what the American view might have been. Heck, I am not even American (nor Japanese). To me both sides were brutal. I was just trying to present what would have been the American point of view in all of that.
Have you ever considered joining Al-Qaeda ? Your views about deaths of civilians seem remarkably similar to theirs.
No, I didn't consider joining Al-Qaeda, but I also didn't consider joining the US Army. So take it for whatever its worth.
So didn't you rather meant to say that "Al Qaeda also knows very well about the effectiveness and shock value of civilian deaths, since they probably learned from the American actions in WWII"
Can you understand in the little brain of yours that I was talking about the perception of the Japanese at that time.
To make it easier for you, let's say you have commited murder or some other crime but served your time. Well then you apply for a job in some office, but they refuse to hire you. Why? Because you have a pretty bad reputation. Legally you are acquited but as long as you live, you'll probably have a difficulty getting a good job. If they hire you and you make some small mistake, they'll fire you faster than someone that never had a criminal history. Why? Because you have made a bad reputation for yourself.
The Japanese have made a pretty bad reputation for themselves, by attacking US without declaring the war (well, the telegram didn't arrive in time), they performed horrible attrocities in China. _The world_, especially the American government, had disgust with everything Japanese, therefore they build those internment camps, and I said that it also played a major role in deciding whether to drop the bomb or not. Had the Japanese telegram arrived in time, had they been less expansionistic and brutal with thier neighbours, perhaps they would not have been bombed.
I didn't say it was right or wrong from my point of view, I was presenting what I think the American point of was at the time. You can understand it and agree with it, or you can disagree with it.
By your own logic al qaeda should attack civilians for the military acts of some US soldiers. Wait...didn't they already do that? Have you heard of 9/11? (...it must be the little brain again...). Do you think it worked? I think it worked great for Al Qaeda! Some nutjobs with box cutters, killed so many people, and most of all sent the world and the US into panic and chronic fear and paranoia. I am not saying they are right to do it, I didn't say the US was right to do it. All I did is present what I think was the point of view and the actions of Japanese and of the Americans at the time. Attacking civilians works, I don't think it is right, but it works. If you are the side attacking, you think it is right, if you are being attacked, the other side is a monster commiting attrocities.
If you want to talk about objective and absolute "right" and "wrong" then we'll just end up talking about god, reality and existense.
Yes, it is the people who can and should choose the goverment they want. I never implied that it would be easy. The sacrifices are made for the generations to come, once and for a very long time (hopefully). I just don't think that many Japanese were against the war. They just blindly followed some crazy dude that decided to attack a giant and powerful country.
I didn't have a choice were I was born (my parents might have).Instead I chose the nation to live in (American) and in which nation my kids will be born (American). Regime change is hard to implement but once in place it lasts. The Americans had to fight for Independence from Britain once and for all, now we have a free country. Would you say that the sacrifice was worth it? Or should the collonists have said "a regime change is pretty hard, we'll never do anything, let's not start a war"?
How about living under Communists? Did you live in a Comunist country that had an almost totalitarial regime? I did, so what happened, people got sick of it and went into the streets, got shot and killed and then more people went into the streets and were trampled by tanks but in the end it is the people who won not the goverment. Sacrifices were made once and now the country is free.
You have to understand that in order for goverment and its offices to exists it has to have a majority approval. If all of a sudden everyone in US decided that killing and pillaging is "alright" then there wouldn't be enough army, police or other government force to stop them. It so happens that most people agree that would not be acceptable and agree that the current goverment model (parhaps not the ruling party though).
That is the first mistake, having a goverment that will completely dictate to its people and distort everything any way it sees fit. Having an emperor with an absolut, god-like power is a recipe for disaster. Sooner or later you are bound to have a Caligula that will go nuts and convince everyone that the sky is actually lime green instead of blue.
In a certain way, that still doesn't change the argument that it was the Japanese Emperor that is responsible for the deaths of its people. He might have made them work in the factories (such as the Mitsubishi) but as far as the country being attacked is concerned these individuals are the ones building bombs and torpedos that kill its soldiers.If you remove the builders of the bombs, you save your own soldier's lives. The correct thing would have been not to invade China, not to attack US, to stay nice and quiet in the island and mind its own business.
The makers of Zyklon-B, that gas that used in the Nazi concentration camps, were convicted and executed for war crimes. The makers didn't kill a single person, they just made chemicals, yet some of these "civilians" were executed for it. You ignore the fact that there is _not_ a sharp destinction between enemy combatant and civilian in two countries that fight each other.
Do you really think that everyone was forced at the gunpoint to work in the factories? I highly doubt it. Some were but most probably were not.
You kill (your own) civilians by starting a war with another country. Then also you commit attrocities in other territories that you already occupied and you are set. You can just sit and wait, some will come and kill your civilians.
That is what Japan did. It could have responded in other ways to the embargo and it could have just stayed on its island in peace and not commit horrible attrocities in China, but they chose not to. By choosing to attack a country much more powerfull than they are they condemned themselves (civilians and military).
The problem with your argument is that it assumes there are innocent lives and there are enemy combatants. The line is not so clear always. What about the ones in the factories, making bombs, are they innocent? A more complete discussion of this is in this topic (civilian vs. enemy fighter) is here
Well, the more exact question, should have been "Didn't they really have any intelligence to estimate that US is many times more powerfull than they are?" It was a huge country that was not crippled by Nazis and that was ready to strike.
The reasonable answer to being pushed into a corner is to appologize for the attrocities commited in China, to return all the conquered territory and to turn against Hitler and become as neutral as possible and perhaps even a US ally. That is what generally Romania did. It was first allied with Germany, as Germany really wanted Romania's energy resourses. But after they saw that it all was going to hell, they switched sides. They lost territory and became a province of the Soviets, but it perhaps spared the lives of its people. Nothing prevented Japan from stopping its expansion and just staying peacefully on its island, minding its own business.
In short, they did what quite a few people do. They went after what they wanted, and rationalized that no one would be in a position to stop them.
While in general it is good to be assertive and try to get what you want, in their case it is like me wanting a Ferrari and then going and stealing one.
Objectively and logically you are right. But the gp post was talking about the general dislike of Japanese in US and the world about that time. Now, when you think of a goverment you can think of it more liek an intelligent, objective, emotionless entity that will mostly come to the right conclusion after debate and much analysis. Or you can look at the goverment (especially a supposedly democratic one) as being the mirror of the people that it governs. So the people will project their fears, emotions, desires, irrationality, bigotry, ignorance, patriotism, sense of justice onto the goverment and thus if there is a general sense of dislike of Japanese at that time, it is reasonable to assume that the goverment through, not so obvious and clear laws as "kill all japs" but more through a series of small, individually not very significant, decision, will act in the likewise manner. Had Japanese not been so brutal and so bold, perhaps, there would not have been an accumulated dislike and hatred for them and perhaps the feeling and the desire to "nuke them" would not have been there.
Even presently the support for Iraq campaign is declining steadily. Few really believe that too many Iraqis are terrorists and that even Saddam is a terrorist. Even the goverment is divided in its support. That was not the case with Afghanistan, there was the Taliban and there was Al Qaeda along with Osama. All that after 9/11 meant a very strong support. If Bush dropped some bombs on a Taliban compound and then by accident killed some children in a hospital, most people would understand and their irrational fear of terrorists and jingoism perhaps would overlook that little "mistake". Now, in Iraq, such mistakes would not be as easily overlooked. People just don't hate Iraqis as much as they hated the Taliban. Iraqis didn't come here flying planes into American buildings, while Taliban and AlQaeda did it.
So back to the Japanese, I think if they had lead a clean battle without excessive attrocities, if they had declared war on U.S. officially before the surprise attack, if they had acted humanly towards the prisoners, I believe that their own civilians might not have ended up being nuked.
That is my oppinion. I blame the Japanese goverment at the time for killing all those people, both American and Japanese. As I said before, the Empire of Japan was the one who sentenced its own people to death when they made their strategic move to attack US. After they set that in motion, US just picked the execution method.
As I posted in another reply, if I decide to go and attack a police officer I should not be surprised if I am thrown to the ground and then beaten havily and excessively, without ever getting a chance to sue or complain about it, everyone one will just think "he's stupid, why would he do that?". That is what I would ask the Japanese, "Why would they do that? Were they really all psychotic and thought they could overtake US in combat?"
Sorry, but the fact they (Japanese) used live humans as petri dishes for deadly bacteria then jumped on them to squeeze out all the blood so they can infect more people and breed more bacteria, somehow, even today, doesn't help at all the cause of those who go around saying "oh the poor Japanese, we shouldn't have bombed them, they are so innocent"
I think it was the Japanese goverment the sealed the fate of it own people when they attacked US. If I send someone from my family to beat up a police officer, I will pretty much seal his/her fate and mine, in other words we'll both be screwed - really long jail times. Same with Japan, it is the one that killed its own people ultimately. The children could die of hunger, die fighting americans in rice fields or they get nuked. Japan sentenced them to death, we just picked the method of execution.
Historians might as well stop asking the question "Why did we nuke them?" and ask the question "what in the hell was Japan thinking when it attacked U.S.?"
The issue of "civilian" vs. "fighter" is often not a black and white kind of thing. If someone is supporting the Nazis and chose to help build the concentration camps, even though they could have had other equally paid job, are they an enemy combatant? What about those that produced Zyklon B (hydrocyanic acid) used in gas chambers, are they enemy combatants? I think they are.
Why doesn't the same apply to the people who worked for the Mitsubishi arms plant in Nagasaki? Most of the town employees where working at the plant building weapons and ammunition to kill Americans. They could have chosen to be farmers, or say teachers, instead they most likely did support the goverment policy and the war against us.
You are right, the children weren't fighting yet, but the ones in Berlin were, and if we invaded Japan a lot more children would have been dead, because they would have been forced to defend "the Empire"
One thing that is always usefull to keep in mind is that it was the Japanese that attacked the U.S. What in the hell were they thinking? It is like me attacking the local police department with a baseball bat, I know I will get in trouble and end up in jail for a long time. If I get my family and friends on it, they will end up in jail for a long time too. Someone might ask me "what in the hell were you thinking?" Same thing with Japan. It was their goverment that sealed the fate of its children and elderly when they attacked U.S. It wasn't a defensive war, it wasn't even a preemtive attack, I don't think US would have ever attacked Japan unprovoked. So when they sent the battleships and the airplanes to Pearl Harbor, they technically "killed" a lot of Japanese civilians and as well as fighters.
On the other side, let's imagine that Japan would have won the war (impossible but let's try) do you think they would hesitate bombing New York, or LA or other major city because there are civilians in it? Probably not, judging by what they did in China
The point of having a kernel that is proven to work right (up to a margin of error) is for it to prevent other programs to hog or take control of the cpu or other resourses. Here even drivers are considered external programs. Then of course each application provider, which might be different than the OS developers, will have to submit its application to be certified.
Imagine that you have a 3 line program that computes the absolute value of some input x say {if(x>=0) abs=x; else abs=-x; return abs;}. Ok do you think you'll be able to write another program that will verify that this program works correctly?
You would look at it and perhaps see that it has one branch. We give it inputs such that both paths in the branch are taken and then you look at the output and see if it is what you want it to be, and _also_ you look at all the rest of the memory and make sure that it didn't change. Maybe give it some extreme values, like the maximums and minimums and then also look at output and the _whole_ memory.
Then can you do the same for a 'for' loop that computes a dot product. You just give the program the known input then at every iteration look for some loop invariants and also check the rest of the memory that shouldn't be affected that it is indeed not affected and then check the output.
Also this means that the code itself has to be written in a certain way in order for its correctness to be checked easily. That means that a lot of nested 'if's are not a good idea, so they try to reduce the branching as much as possible and modularize the program. It is the burden of the software developers to submit their code for certification and pass before it is accepted by FAA or DoD.
This actually can be reduced to the SAT problem, which runs in exponential time (but there are ways to take shortcuts in some of the cases).
I would think that some actual application code that runs on it would define what the system does.
First though before you even let any application code run you have to make sure that no single appliation will ever take control of the memory and cpu for more than it's allowed share. That is what the separation kernel does. You run this small provem and scrutinized piece of code (note: you also need specialized hardware to make sure it will work) that makes absolutely sure (up to a margin of error) that no application will take more than its share of resourses. So if one application crashes it will not crash the system, instead the rest of the machine will continue to work. So that is why sometimes they will run two RTOSes on top of each other with the first being Integrity-178B that will make sure the other OSes on top are partitioned and separated and allocated only a given share of resourses.
No, these are stealth technology undies. Their radar footprint is smaller than a bird, i.e....a cock...maybe a monkey... at most. Definetly not as big as a torpedo, though
On the other side, many a Slashdot geek would be so lucky to have a girlfriend (real one - the bot from UT2004 doesn't count) to steal his underwear...
I think Boeing's flight control computer is based of Integrity-178B by Green Hills that uses a separation kernel. In fact there is LynxSecure, AESecure, VxWorks and LynxOS-178 but Integrity-178B is by far the one with the smallest separation kernel thus the more secure one. Because it can be mathematically proved that it is correct (does what it is supposed to do and nothing more or else),so anything with 500,000 lines (think Linux kernel) is no good for that, need something that is no more than a couple of thousand lines and it still can take up to 2 years to complete the verification process.
So what do you do if ya want complex and sofisticated system calls that the Integrity-178B doesn't provide? Well, use another real-time os on top of Integrity-178B or make it part of Integrity-178B but run it in user mode. So all the drivers are really in user mode in such a system. This all is needed so that no single program if corrupted can hang the system. (Trust me you don't want an airliner's computer to freeze with a BSoD or with a Oops!-Kernel Panic while in mid-air).
Another side note, FAA actually has a concrete limit on the failure due to software. So something like no more than once out of tens of millions of flight hours a plane full of people is allowed to completely crash and burn because of a software problem and have everyone on board die a horrible and painfull death and that would be perfectly "ok" with FAA. So the requirements to certify a system (OS) to fly a plane are very stringent. Linux doesn't even come close. It might be good enough to play music though...
Yeah I love that, that was a good laugh. I can see someone saying, "Hey boss, check out this article about Ajax, we gotta get ourselves some of dat Ajax stuff, its way awesome! Let's click on the link to read more about it - SERVICE UNAVAILABLE - doh!"
It can just continue selling the high performance Hammer, it already is 64 bit, it has more than 1 core (I am sure they can add more), and I am also sure they can make it low power eventually, in other words nothing to worry about.
Back in Russia in early 1990's we had just got a new classroom with IBM computers. The computer science (we called it 'informatics') teacher let us play Sokoban and Lemmings for a grade. It was really fun, made you think logically, and gave the teacher time to go out and run errands and take smoke breaks. A win-win situation if you ask me;)
The problem is also with people willing to pay their money for virtual property. What's next, they'll ask their county to issue them a deed and start financing the "virtual" house through their bank? Come on people, if you pay money for "virtual property" and someone steals, then they commit "virtual theft" - that is theft that is not real. It is _you_ that make theh problem real _for yourself_ by putting your "real" cash into it, so get over it.
Or I like the idea of some Slashdotter that said to put the thief in a virtual jail. Make his character sit in a virtual jail and get virtual bread and water and get virtually pounded in the arse every day. If the virtual world is "real" enough to invest money into it, a jail in a virtual world is just as "real".
As you noted there are a couple of problems with this report.
[1]. The geographical size. They only look at the percentage of people who are connected. Well, if you put everyone from South Korea in hypothetical huge metropolitan region like LA then it is really not that expensive to connect them. Even easier just have a couple of thousand WiFi hotspots and "boom" every South Korean is reading Slashdot. Now spread everyone from South Korea in small towns across US then try to connect them, I bet it won't be as easy.
[2]. For South Korea, connecting its citizens is a government policy. So the government is behind it, here it is not. The Congress din't set any deadline to have everyone wired by such and such date with a broadband connection. That makes a difference too I bet.
[3]In US the broadband is still kind of pricy. Some people who just read email and surf the web (= "most people") don't really see paying $30/month more just so then can get the email in 1 second as opposed to 10 or to have Google load in 1 second as opposed to 5, for example.
I was just making fun of the Creationist/Intelligent Design people that wanted to issue stickers to put on text books. Also it is fun to think of books as source code that can be patched. I guess instead of mistakes they should learn from the programmers and use the word "bugs", as if something external, beyond the control of the publisher just made its way into the text and changed it.
Slashdot Mirror
The key phrase is "...due to Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1937". Japan deserved the embargo. It should have suckit it up and stay nicely on its island. They chose to be expansionistic, they chose to attack, they chose to be brutal, so in fact they chose to either conquer America or have many of its citizens killed. The later happened. It is like they sentences themselves to death and Americans just picked the execution method.
Have you ever considered joining Al-Qaeda ? Your views about deaths of civilians seem remarkably similar to theirs.
No, I didn't consider joining Al-Qaeda, but I also didn't consider joining the US Army. So take it for whatever its worth.
So didn't you rather meant to say that "Al Qaeda also knows very well about the effectiveness and shock value of civilian deaths, since they probably learned from the American actions in WWII"
To make it easier for you, let's say you have commited murder or some other crime but served your time. Well then you apply for a job in some office, but they refuse to hire you. Why? Because you have a pretty bad reputation. Legally you are acquited but as long as you live, you'll probably have a difficulty getting a good job. If they hire you and you make some small mistake, they'll fire you faster than someone that never had a criminal history. Why? Because you have made a bad reputation for yourself.
The Japanese have made a pretty bad reputation for themselves, by attacking US without declaring the war (well, the telegram didn't arrive in time), they performed horrible attrocities in China. _The world_, especially the American government, had disgust with everything Japanese, therefore they build those internment camps, and I said that it also played a major role in deciding whether to drop the bomb or not. Had the Japanese telegram arrived in time, had they been less expansionistic and brutal with thier neighbours, perhaps they would not have been bombed.
I didn't say it was right or wrong from my point of view, I was presenting what I think the American point of was at the time. You can understand it and agree with it, or you can disagree with it.
By your own logic al qaeda should attack civilians for the military acts of some US soldiers. Wait...didn't they already do that? Have you heard of 9/11? (...it must be the little brain again...). Do you think it worked? I think it worked great for Al Qaeda! Some nutjobs with box cutters, killed so many people, and most of all sent the world and the US into panic and chronic fear and paranoia. I am not saying they are right to do it, I didn't say the US was right to do it. All I did is present what I think was the point of view and the actions of Japanese and of the Americans at the time. Attacking civilians works, I don't think it is right, but it works. If you are the side attacking, you think it is right, if you are being attacked, the other side is a monster commiting attrocities.
If you want to talk about objective and absolute "right" and "wrong" then we'll just end up talking about god, reality and existense.
I didn't have a choice were I was born (my parents might have).Instead I chose the nation to live in (American) and in which nation my kids will be born (American). Regime change is hard to implement but once in place it lasts. The Americans had to fight for Independence from Britain once and for all, now we have a free country. Would you say that the sacrifice was worth it? Or should the collonists have said "a regime change is pretty hard, we'll never do anything, let's not start a war"?
How about living under Communists? Did you live in a Comunist country that had an almost totalitarial regime? I did, so what happened, people got sick of it and went into the streets, got shot and killed and then more people went into the streets and were trampled by tanks but in the end it is the people who won not the goverment. Sacrifices were made once and now the country is free.
You have to understand that in order for goverment and its offices to exists it has to have a majority approval. If all of a sudden everyone in US decided that killing and pillaging is "alright" then there wouldn't be enough army, police or other government force to stop them. It so happens that most people agree that would not be acceptable and agree that the current goverment model (parhaps not the ruling party though).
In a certain way, that still doesn't change the argument that it was the Japanese Emperor that is responsible for the deaths of its people. He might have made them work in the factories (such as the Mitsubishi) but as far as the country being attacked is concerned these individuals are the ones building bombs and torpedos that kill its soldiers.If you remove the builders of the bombs, you save your own soldier's lives. The correct thing would have been not to invade China, not to attack US, to stay nice and quiet in the island and mind its own business.
Do you really think that everyone was forced at the gunpoint to work in the factories? I highly doubt it. Some were but most probably were not.
You kill (your own) civilians by starting a war with another country. Then also you commit attrocities in other territories that you already occupied and you are set. You can just sit and wait, some will come and kill your civilians.
That is what Japan did. It could have responded in other ways to the embargo and it could have just stayed on its island in peace and not commit horrible attrocities in China, but they chose not to. By choosing to attack a country much more powerfull than they are they condemned themselves (civilians and military).
The problem with your argument is that it assumes there are innocent lives and there are enemy combatants. The line is not so clear always. What about the ones in the factories, making bombs, are they innocent? A more complete discussion of this is in this topic (civilian vs. enemy fighter) is here
I agree. It might not have been the right thing. It is me who thinks it is a right thing, but that doesn't mean much, just my oppinion.
The reasonable answer to being pushed into a corner is to appologize for the attrocities commited in China, to return all the conquered territory and to turn against Hitler and become as neutral as possible and perhaps even a US ally. That is what generally Romania did. It was first allied with Germany, as Germany really wanted Romania's energy resourses. But after they saw that it all was going to hell, they switched sides. They lost territory and became a province of the Soviets, but it perhaps spared the lives of its people. Nothing prevented Japan from stopping its expansion and just staying peacefully on its island, minding its own business.
In short, they did what quite a few people do. They went after what they wanted, and rationalized that no one would be in a position to stop them.
While in general it is good to be assertive and try to get what you want, in their case it is like me wanting a Ferrari and then going and stealing one.
Even presently the support for Iraq campaign is declining steadily. Few really believe that too many Iraqis are terrorists and that even Saddam is a terrorist. Even the goverment is divided in its support. That was not the case with Afghanistan, there was the Taliban and there was Al Qaeda along with Osama. All that after 9/11 meant a very strong support. If Bush dropped some bombs on a Taliban compound and then by accident killed some children in a hospital, most people would understand and their irrational fear of terrorists and jingoism perhaps would overlook that little "mistake". Now, in Iraq, such mistakes would not be as easily overlooked. People just don't hate Iraqis as much as they hated the Taliban. Iraqis didn't come here flying planes into American buildings, while Taliban and AlQaeda did it.
So back to the Japanese, I think if they had lead a clean battle without excessive attrocities, if they had declared war on U.S. officially before the surprise attack, if they had acted humanly towards the prisoners, I believe that their own civilians might not have ended up being nuked.
That is my oppinion. I blame the Japanese goverment at the time for killing all those people, both American and Japanese. As I said before, the Empire of Japan was the one who sentenced its own people to death when they made their strategic move to attack US. After they set that in motion, US just picked the execution method.
As I posted in another reply, if I decide to go and attack a police officer I should not be surprised if I am thrown to the ground and then beaten havily and excessively, without ever getting a chance to sue or complain about it, everyone one will just think "he's stupid, why would he do that?". That is what I would ask the Japanese, "Why would they do that? Were they really all psychotic and thought they could overtake US in combat?"
Sorry, but the fact they (Japanese) used live humans as petri dishes for deadly bacteria then jumped on them to squeeze out all the blood so they can infect more people and breed more bacteria, somehow, even today, doesn't help at all the cause of those who go around saying "oh the poor Japanese, we shouldn't have bombed them, they are so innocent"
I think it was the Japanese goverment the sealed the fate of it own people when they attacked US. If I send someone from my family to beat up a police officer, I will pretty much seal his/her fate and mine, in other words we'll both be screwed - really long jail times. Same with Japan, it is the one that killed its own people ultimately. The children could die of hunger, die fighting americans in rice fields or they get nuked. Japan sentenced them to death, we just picked the method of execution.
Historians might as well stop asking the question "Why did we nuke them?" and ask the question "what in the hell was Japan thinking when it attacked U.S.?"
Why doesn't the same apply to the people who worked for the Mitsubishi arms plant in Nagasaki? Most of the town employees where working at the plant building weapons and ammunition to kill Americans. They could have chosen to be farmers, or say teachers, instead they most likely did support the goverment policy and the war against us.
You are right, the children weren't fighting yet, but the ones in Berlin were, and if we invaded Japan a lot more children would have been dead, because they would have been forced to defend "the Empire"
One thing that is always usefull to keep in mind is that it was the Japanese that attacked the U.S. What in the hell were they thinking? It is like me attacking the local police department with a baseball bat, I know I will get in trouble and end up in jail for a long time. If I get my family and friends on it, they will end up in jail for a long time too. Someone might ask me "what in the hell were you thinking?" Same thing with Japan. It was their goverment that sealed the fate of its children and elderly when they attacked U.S. It wasn't a defensive war, it wasn't even a preemtive attack, I don't think US would have ever attacked Japan unprovoked. So when they sent the battleships and the airplanes to Pearl Harbor, they technically "killed" a lot of Japanese civilians and as well as fighters.
On the other side, let's imagine that Japan would have won the war (impossible but let's try) do you think they would hesitate bombing New York, or LA or other major city because there are civilians in it? Probably not, judging by what they did in China
The point of having a kernel that is proven to work right (up to a margin of error) is for it to prevent other programs to hog or take control of the cpu or other resourses. Here even drivers are considered external programs. Then of course each application provider, which might be different than the OS developers, will have to submit its application to be certified.
Imagine that you have a 3 line program that computes the absolute value of some input x say {if(x>=0) abs=x; else abs=-x; return abs;}. Ok do you think you'll be able to write another program that will verify that this program works correctly?
You would look at it and perhaps see that it has one branch. We give it inputs such that both paths in the branch are taken and then you look at the output and see if it is what you want it to be, and _also_ you look at all the rest of the memory and make sure that it didn't change. Maybe give it some extreme values, like the maximums and minimums and then also look at output and the _whole_ memory.
Then can you do the same for a 'for' loop that computes a dot product. You just give the program the known input then at every iteration look for some loop invariants and also check the rest of the memory that shouldn't be affected that it is indeed not affected and then check the output.
Also this means that the code itself has to be written in a certain way in order for its correctness to be checked easily. That means that a lot of nested 'if's are not a good idea, so they try to reduce the branching as much as possible and modularize the program. It is the burden of the software developers to submit their code for certification and pass before it is accepted by FAA or DoD.
This actually can be reduced to the SAT problem, which runs in exponential time (but there are ways to take shortcuts in some of the cases).
I would think that some actual application code that runs on it would define what the system does.
First though before you even let any application code run you have to make sure that no single appliation will ever take control of the memory and cpu for more than it's allowed share. That is what the separation kernel does. You run this small provem and scrutinized piece of code (note: you also need specialized hardware to make sure it will work) that makes absolutely sure (up to a margin of error) that no application will take more than its share of resourses. So if one application crashes it will not crash the system, instead the rest of the machine will continue to work. So that is why sometimes they will run two RTOSes on top of each other with the first being Integrity-178B that will make sure the other OSes on top are partitioned and separated and allocated only a given share of resourses.
No, these are stealth technology undies. Their radar footprint is smaller than a bird, i.e. ...a cock...maybe a monkey... at most. Definetly not as big as a torpedo, though
On the other side, many a Slashdot geek would be so lucky to have a girlfriend (real one - the bot from UT2004 doesn't count) to steal his underwear...
So what do you do if ya want complex and sofisticated system calls that the Integrity-178B doesn't provide? Well, use another real-time os on top of Integrity-178B or make it part of Integrity-178B but run it in user mode. So all the drivers are really in user mode in such a system. This all is needed so that no single program if corrupted can hang the system. (Trust me you don't want an airliner's computer to freeze with a BSoD or with a Oops!-Kernel Panic while in mid-air).
Another side note, FAA actually has a concrete limit on the failure due to software. So something like no more than once out of tens of millions of flight hours a plane full of people is allowed to completely crash and burn because of a software problem and have everyone on board die a horrible and painfull death and that would be perfectly "ok" with FAA. So the requirements to certify a system (OS) to fly a plane are very stringent. Linux doesn't even come close. It might be good enough to play music though...
Oh yeah, I'll see your X11 and raise by one Emacs editor.
Yeah I love that, that was a good laugh. I can see someone saying, "Hey boss, check out this article about Ajax, we gotta get ourselves some of dat Ajax stuff, its way awesome! Let's click on the link to read more about it - SERVICE UNAVAILABLE - doh!"
It can just continue selling the high performance Hammer, it already is 64 bit, it has more than 1 core (I am sure they can add more), and I am also sure they can make it low power eventually, in other words nothing to worry about.
Back in Russia in early 1990's we had just got a new classroom with IBM computers. The computer science (we called it 'informatics') teacher let us play Sokoban and Lemmings for a grade. It was really fun, made you think logically, and gave the teacher time to go out and run errands and take smoke breaks. A win-win situation if you ask me ;)
Or I like the idea of some Slashdotter that said to put the thief in a virtual jail. Make his character sit in a virtual jail and get virtual bread and water and get virtually pounded in the arse every day. If the virtual world is "real" enough to invest money into it, a jail in a virtual world is just as "real".
[1]. The geographical size. They only look at the percentage of people who are connected. Well, if you put everyone from South Korea in hypothetical huge metropolitan region like LA then it is really not that expensive to connect them. Even easier just have a couple of thousand WiFi hotspots and "boom" every South Korean is reading Slashdot. Now spread everyone from South Korea in small towns across US then try to connect them, I bet it won't be as easy.
[2]. For South Korea, connecting its citizens is a government policy. So the government is behind it, here it is not. The Congress din't set any deadline to have everyone wired by such and such date with a broadband connection. That makes a difference too I bet.
[3]In US the broadband is still kind of pricy. Some people who just read email and surf the web (= "most people") don't really see paying $30/month more just so then can get the email in 1 second as opposed to 10 or to have Google load in 1 second as opposed to 5, for example.
I was just making fun of the Creationist/Intelligent Design people that wanted to issue stickers to put on text books. Also it is fun to think of books as source code that can be patched. I guess instead of mistakes they should learn from the programmers and use the word "bugs", as if something external, beyond the control of the publisher just made its way into the text and changed it.
They'll just issue a patch for every book. They'll just give everyone a sticker and tell them wich page and paragraphs to stick it on. ;)